Pink Bulbs

I’m loving … pink bulbs

Somehow I just can’t escape from pink so I am about to plant 200 pink tulips that I found in Broersen’s catalogue. 

I succumbed to one hundred ‘Angelique’, described as being a good, long-lasting garden variety with ‘beautiful, almost peony-like double flowers of pale pink shading to white at the edges’ and another hundred ‘Double Price’, also double, in a deeper pink. The display will be divine.

Scilla hispanica. Photo - J S Sira/photolibrary.com

Have you tried pink daffodils? One pink daffodil called ‘Pink Charm’ is a prolific bloomer, often with two flowers per stem. It comes back year after year if you feed it well. And Spanish bluebells are not all blue; there’s a charming pink one called Scilla hispanica ‘Rosea’ that I found in Lambley’s bulb catalogue where it was described as ‘happy in drifts under old elm trees’. I am hoping it will be happy under our old Chinese elm.

Don’t forget about summer flowering bulbs, especially lilies and amaryllis. Winter is the time to plant them. Every year just pop up and have few requirements apart from some bulb food a few times through their growing cycle and some water through the dry months.

I am also planting more lilies, pink ones of course. ‘Medusa’, ‘Rio Negro’ and ‘Pandora’ are varieties of pink liliums, all with a fabulous fragrance. You will find them at Van Diemen Quality Bulbs. These tall oriental lilies need staking for support, and are good for the back of the flower border. Once planted they dislike being moved, so you need to remember where they are, especially once the foliage is cut. 

Pink lilies. Photo - David Dixon/photolibrary.com 

Text: Sandra Ross